Wireless telephones have grown more and more prevalent in recent years. As wireless telephones have increased in importance, they have also become more integrated into the daily lives of the users. More and more elaborate wireless telephones have become available, performing more and more functions. Wireless telephones have traditionally included enhanced features such as programmable ring tones, speed dial and similar features, and there is now a desire on the part of developers and consumers to include functions such as personal digital assistant (PDA) features, web browsing features and numerous other functions and features to wireless telephones.
The more features a wireless telephone includes, the more processing power it requires. Because consumers have shown a strong desire for a wireless telephone to be small and lightweight, space for processing hardware has always been at a premium. Therefore, addition of features can be difficult to achieve if the addition of features increases the processing power required and results in a concomitant increase in size or reduction in battery life.
Moreover, as wireless telephones become more and more integrated into the lives of the users, users become more attached to the particular features possessed by their personal wireless telephones. A user may spend time choosing and setting features of a wireless telephone and may appreciate an opportunity to retain those features when replacing or upgrading the telephone. Moreover, because of the demands which features place on the available processing power, it may be desirable to choose only desired features, rather than the entire set of features which may be available.
Certain features of wireless telephones, such as data transfer and processing for communication, must execute in real time and require immediate attention from the processing resources of the telephone. It may be desired to add additional features to a telephone in order to provide greater utility. Such additional features may include scheduling and calendar features such as may be found in a personal digital assistant, speed dialing, web browsing and the like. Timing is typically not critical to the accomplishment of such functions. For example, a personal digital assistant operation such as looking up an address is done on a time scale characteristic of human activities. The entry of the address lookup index may occur over a period of several seconds, and if the display of the address occurs within a second after entry of the index, a human being is not likely to notice any delay. Such processes can therefore be given a lower priority than the communication functions of a telephone, and can be fitted into available time windows not occupied by communication functions. If enhanced features such as personal digital assistant operations and the like are performed using the same hardware that is used in providing communication processing for the telephone, it is necessary to enhance the processing hardware, often at considerable expense, or else risk an unacceptable degradation of the communication functions. It is therefore highly desirable to accomplish enhanced functions in a way that does not tend to occupy processor resources which are better devoted to the central communication functions of the telephone.
Moreover, certain functions related to communication, such as registration and authentication, are accomplished during initial power up of the telephone or at the beginning of a call, and before any critical communication processing is occurring. It is therefore possible to accomplish these functions in a way which does not involve components better reserved for critical communication processing.
There exists, therefore, a need in the art for a wireless telephone which is capable of performing enhanced functions without diverting computational resources needed by communication functions, which allows for portability of enhanced functions and which allows for selection of which enhanced functions are to be operational in the telephone.